The Mozilla Mobile Blog

Posts by ragavan

We are pleased to announce the release of Firefox Home 1.1, a free application that brings your Firefox bookmarks, Awesome Bar history and tabs on your iPhone or iPod Touch. This is a major update that adds an easy way to setup Firefox Home. Note that easy setup requires you to run the latest Firefox 4 Beta release and is not available for the Firefox Sync add-on.

You can follow these simple steps to set up Firefox Home on your iPhone/iPod. Make sure your phone is connected to the Internet and you can access the desktop where Firefox Sync is installed.

Launch Firefox Home on your iPhone and tap on “I Have a Sync Account”. A 12 character code will be displayed for you.

Click on “Add a Device” and enter the 12 character code that’s displayed on your iPhone.

You’re done! You can start using Firefox Home as your data gets synced down to your phone.

Existing users can also use this new method (requires the latest Firefox 4 Beta) to set up Firefox Home. Note that the traditional setup method still works if you prefer entering in your username, password and Sync Key. To use the traditional method, tap on “I am not near by computer” to bring up the account setup dialog.

Firefox Home for the iPhone is one of the first applications to showcase the benefits of having your Firefox data in the cloud. We received an amazing response to the launch of Firefox Home in the Apple App Store and have worked to make the app even better. Now, we want to share our plan for Firefox Home and are eager to hear your feedback.

What is Firefox Home?

Firefox Home is a free cloud-based application that lets you access your Firefox desktop history, bookmarks and tabs on your iPhone. Want to pull up that funny video you were watching just before you left home? Open Firefox Home and your web history is right there. Forgot to print out directions to the restaurant before leaving work? Firefox Home gives you instant access to your desktop tabs.

On platforms that cannot support the full Firefox browser, Firefox Home saves the day by providing access to your Firefox history.

As we look to the future, we identified a couple of areas of focus for Firefox Home and would love to hear what you think.

Provide access to more Firefox data on your phone and add social functionality.
For example:

Synchronize passwords to your phone so you don’t have to type them in anymore.

Better integrate with new iOS4 features and other native applications (such as Youtube, Maps, Mobile Safari etc.)

Bring other Firefox customizations such as search engine preferences.

Bring your Firefox Panorama settings and tab groups to your phone.

Some of our more experimental features will allow you to easily share links, reviews and comments with your friends on

Twitter, Facebook or other social networks directly from Firefox Home.

Build the ability to provide feedback and get help with any issues directly from within Firefox Home.

Bring Firefox Home to more platforms

In addition to adding new features, another big focus is to bring Firefox Home to other phones where users don’t have the Firefox browser. We are working to bring Firefox Home to both Blackberry and Symbian platforms in the coming months. We want to offer people access to their Firefox data no matter where they are, and these two platforms make up around 60% of the worldwide smartphone market combined. We’ve also heard interest for an iPad version of Firefox Home and will investigate this option further.

No Firefox Browser for the iPhone

We are working to bring as much of your Firefox experience as possible to Firefox Home. People have asked about adding more browser-like features to Firefox Home, but there are technical and logistical restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the full Firefox browser for the iPhone. We are focused on building Firefox Home as a rich, cloud-based application and making it a valuable product that people will continue to love and use.

Give us feedback

We would love to hear your thoughts around Firefox Home. In particular:

Do you have a cool new feature you want to see in Firefox Home? Tell us about it.